By CLAUDIA H. DEUTSCH

Published: October 16, 1994

LAST month, when Swiss Bank announced it would leave New York for Stamford, Conn., it was big news in both cities. New York, still smarting from the defection of small-but-high-profile Mastercard to Westchester, now faces the prospect that 1,300 Swiss Bank jobs -- and 700 planned new ones -- will vanish up Interstate 95. Stamford not only gets the jobs, but also a new office complex in a seedy part of town.

Stamford officials and landlords profess delight, but not surprise. After all, Connecticut gave Swiss Bank tax breaks that could amount to $120 million over 10 years. And, they note, Swiss Bank is just the latest -- albeit the largest -- company leaving New York for Stamford these days.

"Swiss Bank is just an exclamation mark to what is happening here," said H. Darrell Harvey, president of The Ashforth Company, a Stamford real estate concern.

Indeed, Stamford is going through a renaissance. According to Christopher P. Bruhl, president of the Business Council of Southwestern Connecticut, more than 300 companies have relocated to Fairfield County -- most to Stamford -- in the last five years. Very few of those, Mr. Bruhl notes, were given incentives to come.

"Those relocations aren't because of incentives or cheap rents," Mr. Bruhl said. "If you want cheap, you go to Brazil or North Carolina. We're about value."

Stamford afficionados predict even more newcomers in Swiss Bank's wake.

"All the service companies that will follow, the accounting firms, the legal firms, even the messenger services, will gobble up the remaining space," said Michael J. Cacace, a partner in Cacace, Tusch & Santagata, a Stamford law firm.

Apparently, investors believe that, too. In the last few years Zell/Merrill Lynch has spent $132 million to buy five office buildings. Equity Office Properties has paid $146.45 million for another five Stamford buildings and has been renovating them.

"We feel all of these buildings are undervalued assets and that the Stamford market has hit bottom," said Patrick Lerch, Equity's northeast regional manager.

Stamford's nascent revival is being actively nurtured. Local officials persuaded the state to put a University of Connecticut campus in downtown Stamford, at the site of a closed Bloomingdale's. A new cultural center has opened. So have nightclubs, discos and restaurants that cater to a young, lively crowd. The train station will be getting a $50 million overhaul next year, which will double its capacity for trains by 1998.

BUT all that is nothing compared to Stamford's overhaul in self-image. Over the years, the city has gradually metamorphosed from an old-line manufacturing center into a service industry hub. The Business Council's statistics show that employment in finance, insurance and real estate -- the so-called FIRE sector -- in the greater Stamford area has grown 45 percent in the last five years.

"This area has a tremendously well-educated, highly professional labor pool," said Mr. Harvey. "Those companies that can afford to tap into it are getting the best."

The new service emphasis has been a wrenching change for Stamford. During the 60's and 70's, Stamford evolved into a corporate campus city, a place where industrial companies like Olin, Xerox and Combustion Engineering built palace-like headquarters. Lawyers, accountants and others looking to serve the industrial behemoths soon followed. Well-paid executives for those companies moved nearby, to parts of Stamford and to such neighboring communities as Greenwich, New Canaan, Darien and Westport. For no small reason is Fairfield County known as Connecticut's Gold Coast.

But in the late 80's the lagging economy forced many corporations to cut staff, and thus space. Many others subscribed to the growing belief that American corporations had too many layers of management. They, too, began pruning their staffs.

The effects of downsizing, as well as of the highway congestion that had accompanied the earlier expansion, rippled throughout Stamford. Many downtown stores closed or moved to the Stamford Mall. The F. D. Rich Company, for decades Stamford's premier office-building developer, lost its buildings to its lenders one by one.

"By 1991 Stamford real estate was dead in the water," said Anthony E. Malkin, president of W & M Properties, which owns two Class A office buildings in the city.

The aftershocks continue. According to the Edward S. Gordon Company, the real estate concern, the International Business Machines Corporation, Olin and ABB Combustion Engineering returned more than 650,000 square feet to the Fairfield County market in the second quarter of 1994.

Cummings & Lockwood, perhaps the area's largest law firm, Champion International and Lone Star Industries each put big blocks of space on the market for sublet. GTE and other companies that are not looking for sublet tenants have nonetheless shrunk enough to rattle around in their buildings.

BUT the good news has been considerable, too. Stamford never relied heavily on now-beleaguered industries like military contracting. GE Capital, now its leading corporate citizen, has expanded to several buildings and is buying Olin's 277,000-square-foot headquarters.